How to capture Ramit Sethi’s attention (or anyone’s)

When I was heading up Marketing at RunKeeper, I took my first stab at PR by playing the volume game. I hammered out one canned pitch email after another. The result? A pathetic 7% response rate on a good week. So I tested a new game. First, I actually read reporters’ articles before I reached out. I went for real connections and quality over quantity. Then I worked hard to make my press releases easy for them to read. I cut out the jargon. (Sometimes longer is better, but always be efficient with your words. Trust me, no one likes the sound of your voice as much as you do. Nix.) I also polished the style. I used section headers, bullets and selective underlining or italics to tell the story.

The results?

My newly crafted notes sung with a genuine interest in the reporters’ work, immediately driving the response rate up to 37%. Which reminds me of a story: I was on Quora when it was cool to be on Quora, back when it was still just a bunch of self-important bleeding-edge hipsters. And you know what? Ramit Sethi liked my answers so much, he picked up the phone to see if I wanted to geek out over marketing analytics together. It’s pretty simple—choose your words wisely, and people will like you (or at least, listen to you).

The Takeaway: Keep it real. Get to the point. Highlight the good stuff.

Sarah Hodges is the Co-Founder of Intelligent.ly, a learning campus that connects experts with professionals who want to hone their skills. While previously at RunKeeper, she drove coverage in The New York Times, Tech Crunch, Gigaom and Mashable.